A three-hour flight to an island showed me I’d been doing holidays wrong

There was a moment, as I shimmied along a cable slung 80 metres above the canyon floor, when I looked out over Vanuatu’s Mele Bay and thought: how did I get here?

Right hand over left, like a monkey on a vine, I hauled myself along the zip line. To the west, a panoramic coastline view of Efate, Vanuatu’s main island, and moody skies. A lush jungle in every other direction, including below my legs dangling out the other end of my harness. This was not the relaxing break my boss had sold me. And I was overdue for one.

It had been a singularly gruelling few months of work, and I had become prone to hyperbole. I wanted to couch rot. But on a sun lounger. On a beach. Or an inflatable neon pink flamingo. Instead, I’m ensnared in a jam-packed four-day itinerary of island activities.

I am a holiday hoarder. Like a miser, I would save my annual leave for one holiday per year, at least four weeks long, with at least one layover traversing multiple time zones, and NO group tours.

This was the only way I could switch off my brain and return to work re-energised and motivated. Distance + Duration = negative burnout.

But this Vanuatu adventure, just a three-hour flight away, proved I have been doing it all wrong. The non-stop itinerary? Genius. I dare anyone to sustain a work-fuelled anxiety spiral when you’re swinging from a Tarzan rope over Vanuatu’s Blue Lagoon, leaping into the Rentapao River’s cascades, or battling the winds, rain and steam on the rim of an active volcano.

In another twist, I have become an evangelist for travelling with strangers.My four fellow voyagers – writers, content creators, and seasoned travellers – were a delight from the first meeting. And in the comfort of my anonymity, so was I. We were all blank slates, free from interpersonal baggage.

Together, we eavesdropped on a rare in-person flirtation at Port Vila’s Bauerfield International Airport. No dating apps, no swiping. Just a plucky young man delivering an adorably redundant: “Are you waiting for your bag?” to our youngest companion, Katie.

It helped us pass the “Island Time”. The baggage handlers were clearly operating under Vanuatu’s unofficial policy: “no hurry, no worry”. But the 25-minute transit to our accommodation at Mangoes Resort still left time to freshen up before a pre-dinner drink at Stone Lounge to watch the sunset over Fatumaru Bay.

When we moved next door to The Stonegrill Restaurant, we shared fresh seafood and steak seared on hot stones at our table. A rumpled white kitten curled up on my lap. Horrified, one of my fellow travellers doused me in hand sanitiser and spent the rest of the trip monitoring my appendages for ringworm.

There were no signs of disease the next morning. Instead, Vanuatu Ecotours’ open-backed truck, with a bench bolted to the tray,delivered us to a small flotilla of bright yellow and orange kayaks by the banks of the Rentapao River. “Watch out for fire ants,” our chief guide, Roy, warned as we paddled upstream through the rainforest. Every so often, one of us would drift into the foliage of an overhanging branch and, arms wildly windmilling, paddle away.

As we passed by villages, we could hear the choral music of a Sunday service. Along the east bank, women washed their laundry, all using the same violent pink and pungent washing powder. Kids splashing in the shallows waved back, then dissolved into giggles.We stopped under the branches of a Banyan tree with prop roots that stretched into the cool water like fingers testing the temperature.

“Some people call them walking trees,” our guide told us. Their roots, which stretch from their branches into the earth, appear to “crawl”, shifting the tree over decades to new ground searching for better sunlight and earth.

I’d spend the rest of the trip looking for these ancient giants whose trunks seemed to support an entire jungle in their matrix of branches. But not before our next stop: the Summit and Vanuatu Jungle Zip line, about 25 minutes by 4WD from Port Vila. Within minutes, we were helmeted, harnessed and zipping along the first of six zip lines totalling about 1.3 kilometres of cable above the tropical canopy. We grew bolder with each section. By the fourth cable, we were hanging upside-down Spiderman-style, careening past giant ferns and bursts of orange flowers.

Then came the last zip line: 300 metres across the canyon. With wind blowing across the cable, I tried to be aerodynamic, lying horizontal under the cable, but sheer velocity wasn’t enough to get me across, and here is where you joined me, dear reader. Like a monkey on a vine. It was an exhilarating experience, but not daredevil stuff. For that, you’re after the canyon swing: a vertical drop from 70 metres attached to a cable that eventually jerks you back up into a sweeping arc through the canyon reaching a top speed of 120 km/h, in three-and-a-half seconds.

No power on Earth, not FOMO or YOLO, could compel me to get into that harness. But one of our party, Annaliese, was in her “YES” era. She had plenty of time to work herself into an almost paralysing state of fear as we waited 90-ish minutes at the edge of the canyon for the necessary staff well-practised in throwing tourists off platforms. Legs shaking and eyes closed, Annaliese crossed the narrow bridge to a hut the size of two portaloos suspended in the middle of the chasm.

In the manner of a condemned sinner pleading with their executioner, she implored the swing operator to spare her a grisly death (“I have two children!“). Then, wailing an expletive, she stepped into nothingness and dropped like a stone. But as the cable snagged, pitching her into a soaring upward arc, she was all adrenaline and ecstasy as I watched on, full of pride for this woman I had met less than 40 hours ago.

The next morning there was a four before the colon on the clock when my alarm went off. I had been dreading this early start since I saw it on the itinerary. But waking up on day two, I was all in. And we had a volcano to climb. Tanna is an island about an hour’s flight south of Port Vila and home to Yasur – “Old Man” in a local dialect – one of the world’s most accessible volcanoes.

From the rear-facing seats of a 4WD ute, we watched as Tanna morphed from coastal villages to an almost moon-like landscape as we passed from dense bush, thick rainforest, mist-covered hills and black, mineral-rich volcanic soil, to silty dunes of dark grey and the flat expanse of the ash plain. Clear skies and warm air gave way to the volcano’s microclimate of thick cloud and rain. We smelled sulphur before we saw Yasur.

The rain poured as we climbed the rocky footpath to the volcano’s rim. The steam from the 300-metre-wide crater was so thick we couldn’t see more than a couple of metres over the edge of the 100-metre-deep chasm. But we could hear the old man groan.

Yasur’s sudden thunderous booms were terrifying and I suppressed the urge to run down the slope with every eruption of volcanic gas. The infinity pool at Breakas Beach Resort, our accommodation for the evening, overlooks a beach lined with loungers, none of which I tried. That was no longer the mission.

The Major Tom, a custom-built 60-foot sailboat owned by Ben and Emily (and their silver Labrador, Bowie), had collected us and 30-odd other guests from Gideon’s Landing in Efate’s Havannah Harbour. We spent the day launching ourselves off a raised platform at the bow, snorkelling the coral reef, duck-diving over a small plane wreck and souvenir shopping on the stingray-shaped Lelepa inlet.

Our group, with its broad age range and odd gender split (four women and one man), was a curiosity to our fellow tourists, who eventually sidled over to ask how we knew each other. So over a BBQ lunch on the deck of Major Tom, we invented a backstory that involved a twisted family tree, festering grudges, red herrings and a suspicious death. We decided against scattering the ashes of our apocryphal stepmother-slash-mistress over Palaf Bay and went snorkelling instead.

It amazed me that Major Tom had such a beautiful bay all to itself (our tender, “Ground Control”, notwithstanding).

“Vanuatu is Fiji in the 70s,” skipper Ben says admiringly. It’s a line I’ve heard before to spruik the archipelago of 83 islands, which have only recently begun to welcome back tourists following the devastating 2024 earthquake. It still has that off-the-beaten-track appeal. I’d come back – a reunion trip for our dysfunctional family. Travelling with a Gen Z and a micro-influencer means my holiday selfies are smouldering. After all, it only takes four days’ holiday to get me out of my work funk (I practically skipped back into the office). And we still need to get rid of those ashes.

The Details

Fly
Jetstar flies direct from Sydney to Port Vila. Virgin Australia and Qantas fly direct from Brisbane. See jetstar.com, Virgin Australia, Qantas.

Stay
Garden View Bungalows at Mangoes Resort, Port Vila, overlooking the lagoon are $285 per night. Tropical garden bungalows at Breakas Beach Resort, on Port Vila’s Pango Peninsula, are $335 per night. See Mangoes Resort, Breakas Beach Resort.

Experience
Yasur Volcano Day Tours cost about $1000 per person and includes flights, transfers, packed lunch, 4WD to Yasur and entrance fees. See Air Taxi Vanuatu

More
See Vanuatu Tourism

The writer was a guest of the Vanuatu Tourism Office and Jetstar.